From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Tue 03 Dec 2002 - 17:54:05 GMT
I looked at the Wired article. Marcer, the PI, says that his real hope is
to find out 'how humans think.' To do this, he says, one needs the map of
ideas that he is proposing.
Whether or not such a map can be built (I doubt it, strongly), and
regardless of how useful it might be, I don't think it is necessary to
figure out how humans think: thinking happens in the individual, and at the
societal level in the form of what we call culture. So one can figure our
the 'how' of thinking, without having to have a catalog of all the
thoughts/beliefs that have been thought or held by human beings.
I would also guess that the Wired article is pretty poorly written, and that
Marcer may have more to him than the article suggests.
Cheers,
Lawry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of William Benzon
> Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 11:28 AM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Japanese Univ. to set up world meme bank
>
>
> on 12/2/02 10:25 AM, Grant Callaghan at grantc4@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > They use the term "ideas" rather than memes but the concept looks like a
> > meme bank to me.
> >
> > Check out: http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56374,00.html
> >
> > Frankly, I think the idea is too big for a university and the number of
> > ideas (memes) in the world is growing much too fast for any
> group to keep
> > up.
> >
>
> >From my point of view, the most astonishing thing about this proposal is
> that they guy seems utterly unaware of the large body of recent
> research on
> this general topic (generally know as knowledge representation,
> perhaps with
> an emphasis on ontology). Looks like he's setting out to reinvent the
> wheel.
>
> Bill B
> --
>
> William L. Benzon
> 708 Jersey Avenue, Apt. 2A
> Jersey City, NJ 07302
> 201 217-1010
>
> "You won't get a wild heroic ride to heaven on pretty little
> sounds."--George Ives
>
>
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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